With its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, the US Supreme Court has dealt yet another blow to voting rights.
Congressional districts with large concentrations of Black voters are being gerrymandered out of existence in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Alabama, with more to follow.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was conceded under the mass pressure of the civil rights movement. It prohibited discrimination in voting and the redrawing of district lines to dilute the voting power of racial minorities.
The Supreme Court has now decided it’s constitutional to gerrymander a Black-majority district if it’s done on the basis of partisanship and there isn’t any explicit, “non-political” evidence of racism. In the words of Justice Samuel Alito, there would need to be proof that the legislature “intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”
The practical result is that Black people’s votes can be sliced and diced to achieve politicians’ cynical needs. Before the ink was dry on the Supreme Court’s decision, Tennessee drew new congressional districts, splitting the Black population of Memphis into three different districts, thus undermining its potential electoral power.
The ruling, pushed forward by the particularly reactionary Justices Roberts, Thomas, and Alito, has three objectives: turn the clock back to the 1950s; distract and divide the working class by attacking democratic rights to fan the flames of culture-war politics; and help the Republicans win seats in the midterm elections.
Why is the fight for voting rights important?
The right to vote and to political representation—like the right to freedom of speech, assembly, or abortion—is a basic democratic right the working class has fought for. Communists are at the forefront of battles to defend and expand these rights.
The ruling class has ownership and control of all major media and meeting spaces. It controls the educational institutions that indoctrinate the population into their political system. And the capitalist class owns the wealth to influence any elected government to do what it wants.
All that being said, it would be wrong to conclude that since the capitalists control the political system, there’s no reason to fight for the right to vote. Workers must not give up any rights they could use in their fight against capitalism.
The working class must participate in the political system to put forward its class point of view and demands. Along with strikes and other mass movements, it’s through political struggle that the working class becomes conscious of itself, its objectives, and potential power. These battles reveal the real class balance of forces and the limits of capitalism, exposing capitalist democracy as a threat to workers’ livelihoods, and clarifying the need for workers’ democracy.
The working class must also fight against attacks on especially oppressed layers of the population. It must combat any attempts to divide it along lines of race, gender, nationality, religion, etc. As an example, when white workers fight against racist attacks, this helps to win the confidence of Black workers, undermining divisions.
At the same time, the working class as a whole is effectively disenfranchised as it has no party to represent it. Both the Democratic and Republican Parties are institutions of the capitalists. Replacing a white bourgeois politician with a Black one does not bring about change. Only a genuine workers’ party could really start to give voice to the majority of the population.
It is through political activity and experience that workers will come to see their class interests. But the Supreme Court’s actions only serve to confuse and divide them, going all the way back to the Bill of Rights.
Rights come from struggle
A nauseating stream of bourgeois propaganda claims the Constitution and the courts are the guardians of people’s freedom. History tells us the opposite. Mass struggle is what forced the ruling class to concede democratic rights and reforms.
The capitalist class is a small minority that enforces its rule over the working-class majority through its state apparatus. The form of this class dictatorship in the United States is bourgeois democracy, as shaped by the Constitution of 1787. The pillars of bourgeois rule include the president and Congress, as well as the judicial branch, headed by the Supreme Court.
After the collapse of Reconstruction, a tsunami of local and state laws were passed to dilute Black Americans’ political power or to prevent them from voting altogether. Blacks suffered under counterrevolutionary violence and Jim Crow segregation from the 1870s through the 1960s. / Image: public domain
The members of the country’s top court are appointed by the president for life. Despite attempts to paint itself as impartial and non-political, this unelected body is very much a partisan implementer of capitalist policies, “interpreting” the Constitution and laws to serve ruling-class interests.
The American ruling class claims to have established the most democratic country in the world, and yet it took 189 years from its founding to achieve universal suffrage.
At the time of the Constitution’s ratification, the 13 states required men who were 21 years of age or older to own a certain amount of property to be eligible to vote. Women, slaves, and Native Americans were excluded. Slaves couldn’t own property, as they were considered to be property.
Over time, as a byproduct of political struggle, the right to vote was expanded and property requirements were dropped. The US only granted women suffrage with the 19th Amendment in 1919, under pressure from the Russian Revolution, which had granted this right two years earlier. Only in 1971 did the 26th Amendment expand suffrage to everyone 18 and older.
The fight against racism
The gains of the mass revolutionary struggles of the Civil War and the Reconstruction were partially codified in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. These amendments ended slavery, recognized the freedpeople as citizens, and gave Black males the right to vote, among other progressive changes.
However, this was all temporary. After the collapse of Reconstruction, a tsunami of local and state laws were passed to dilute Black Americans’ political power or to prevent them from voting altogether. Many states mandated literacy tests and imposed poll taxes, from which white people could be exempted. Blacks suffered under counterrevolutionary violence and Jim Crow segregation from the 1870s through the 1960s.
The Supreme Court always provided legal cover for this brutal racism: from the three-fifths clause in the Constitution counting slaves as less than a full human, to the infamous “separate but equal” 1896 ruling that accepted segregation as constitutional. It was not the benevolence of bourgeois institutions, but fierce popular movements, that forced reforms.
There were periods of struggle as early as the 1930s, including the building of the CIO, the battle to free the Scottsboro Boys, and the attempts to march on Washington in 1941. After World War II, the struggle of the Black population escalated, culminating in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.
The collective mass action of Black and white workers brought about an end to legal segregation, and pressured the government to pass the 24th Amendment, the Voting Rights Act, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These concessions sought to get people off the streets and into the courts.
Nonetheless, these were massive victories that required years of sustained struggle and were paid for in blood. The police, in cahoots with the Ku Klux Klan and other fascist organizations, attacked and injured many. In the infamous 1963 Birmingham church bombing, they murdered four Black girls aged 11 to 14. That same year, a Klansman killed Medgar Evers with a shot in the back. In 1964, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, three students involved in registering Black people to vote, were murdered. The list goes on and on, and culminates with the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today, the same rights that working-class martyrs fought and died for are being undermined. As long as the capitalist system exists, any reforms can be rolled back.
Race no longer an issue?
In the Louisiana v. Callais ruling, Judge Alito writes that much has changed in the past 40 years. Apparently, racism is no longer a problem. He claims that “politics” is a “race-neutral” consideration. But as we’ve seen, racism has been part and parcel of US politics from the country’s inception.
American capitalism was built on a foundation of divide and rule. From the late 1600s to the Civil War, racism and white supremacy were used to divide the masses and justify chattel slavery. After the Civil War, the capitalist ruling class continued to use this poisonous ideology.
We stand against attacks on the Voting Rights Act. But we must also recognize that, given the absence of a working-class party, the law provides little protection for the lives and material conditions of millions of Black workers. / Image: Miki Jourdan, Flickr
The bourgeois tried to create the impression that racism was simply a question of individual prejudice. In reality, they consciously developed and fomented racism and white-supremacist ideology to keep the working-class majority divided and distracted from its real enemy. This division also depresses wages from the higher level that would be established if the working class were united in struggle. In short, the capitalist class benefits materially from racism.
In 1964, Black people made up about 15% of the US population, with 60% living in the Southern states. But only six congressmen out of 435 representatives were Black, and none represented the South. The US Senate was all white. Many Black people had been prevented from voting—especially, though not exclusively, in the South—and there were all sorts of obstacles to political activity.
Today, about 55% of the Black population lives in the South. The average white American lives in a neighborhood that is over 70% white, while the average Black American lives in a neighborhood that is about 35% white. This does not just happen by accident, but is a product of capitalist housing coupled with long-standing institutional racism.
The fact is that the ruling class has both racially segregated the population and set up a system of representation based on where people live. It is ridiculous and disingenuous to deny that there is a major racial component when drawing the boundaries of election districts.
The open racism of the pre–civil rights days has been replaced by subtler forms of racist oppression. Today, racists seek to cover their tracks with excuses and pretextual arguments, just as the advocates of literacy tests and the poll tax claimed they were not trying to stop Blacks from voting.
Republican Congressman Andy Ogles wrote on X justifying the new districts: “For too long, Tennessee politics has been dominated by cosmopolitan communists and race hustlers imposing their corrupt will on a deeply rural and conservative state.” Given the history of Jim Crow racist terror in his state, doesn’t Ogles’s use of “race hustlers” in itself reveal the racism? Not according to the Supreme Court.
Fight for a workers’ government
In decaying American capitalism, even basic democratic rights are not guaranteed. We stand against attacks on the Voting Rights Act. But we must also recognize that, given the absence of a working-class party, the law provides little protection for the lives and material conditions of millions of Black workers.
The Democratic bourgeois politicians who were elected, both Black and otherwise, not only maintained this horrible system but have no strategy or intention to fight the present rollbacks. They put their confidence in the bourgeois parties and courts, while we put our confidence in the power of mass social movements and the working class.
The Democrats are not defenders of democratic rights. Both capitalist parties use gerrymandering to their advantage, and raise all kinds of obstacles to prevent third parties from getting on the ballot. In the June election for governor of California, the Democrats used bureaucratic technicalities to get Green Party candidate Butch Ware off the ballot, thus forcing him to wage an impotent “write-in” campaign.
The overwhelming majority of Black people, and the population as a whole, are workers. The struggle to defend and expand democratic rights must be tied to the building of a workers’ party. Only class independence can effectively fight racism and the divisive poison of identity politics. As communists, we must connect the fight for democratic rights and reforms with the struggle for a workers’ government and socialism.